Introduction 5
saved and who everywhere were prepared to serve.^15 Such attitudes, whether towards
Muslims or Jews, appear culpably wanting to modern sensibilities, and we may
argue that popes did not do enough to protect Jewish communities in the High
Middle Ages. Nevertheless, as we shall discover, in terms of a society where anti-
Judaism was rife, many papal pronouncements about the Jews appear unusually
moderate and even strikingly positive.^16
Thus, the picture that emerges of the relationship between popes and the Jewish
communities of medieval Europe is much more complex than the phrase ‘papal
policy’ allows. To begin with—an important point which some recent scholars
have often failed sufficiently to emphasize—only a very small proportion of the vast
correspondence popes addressed to the Christian faithful refers to Jews or Judaism.^17
How to continue to guarantee basic rights for European Jewry, long since enshrined
in Roman Law;^18 how to protect Jews from outbreaks of hostility, whether from
marauding crusaders or from charges of ritual murder, host-desecration, or blood
libel;^19 how at the same time to combat the perceived danger to Christians of social
mingling with Jews and intellectual contact with Judaism: these could become life-
and-death issues for the Jewish communities. Yet they were of limited relevance to
papal concern with ensuring the well-being of the papacy through the mainten-
ance and expansion of the papal states, providing leadership to the episcopacy,
developing pastoral care, formulating doctrine and canon law, and engaging in
political wheeling and dealing with kings and emperors to augment the temporal
and so safeguard the spiritual power of the papacy at the centre of Christian life.^20
Such limited interest in the Jews was not unique to popes; it was also reflected
in the writings of contemporary theologians.^21 Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the
foremost intellectual of his age, declared in the Summa Theologica that Jews must
be altogether prevented from exacting usury, but were nevertheless to be tolerated
15 Alexander II’s letter was intended to signal the papacy’s unreserved protection of the Jews, not to
threaten that the Church would wage war on the Jews if, like the Muslims, they began to oppose
Christian rule. See Stow, The ‘1007 Anonymous’ and Papal Sovereignty, p.13.
16 Grayzel acknowledged this: ‘It is not difficult to imagine what the fate of the Jews would have
been had not the popes made it a part of Church policy to guarantee the Jews life, and rights of reli-
gious observance’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.81.
17 From what survives we can roughly estimate that the number of papal letters concerned with the
Jews in the twelfth and thirteenth century was not large. 237 letters are recorded in Simonsohn.
According to Grayzel only a very small percentage of surviving papal letters from the first half of the
thirteenth century referred to Jews: thirty-two of Innocent III, twenty-four of Honorius III, forty-six
of Gregory IX, and thirty-two of Innocent IV. In Simonsohn the numbers are respectively: twenty-
nine, twenty-five, forty-nine and thirty-five. And of these, as we shall see, the number concerned with
Jews in the specific context of crusades, both ‘internal’ and to the Near East, was even smaller. See
Grayzel Vol. 1, pp.1–83, passim, for the exact number.
18 Edward Synan, The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages (New York, London, 1965),
pp.17–30.
19 By ‘blood libel’ I mean specifically the notion that Jews murdered Christians and consumed
their blood for magical or ritual purposes, sometimes referred to by scholars as ‘ritual cannibalism’; see
Robert Stacey, ‘From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration: Jews and the Body of Christ’, Jewish
History 12/1 (1998), 14 and especially footnote 23.
20 Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.82.
21 For example, the number of texts pertaining to the Jews in the ‘Liber extra decretalium’ (1234)
of Gregory IX, commissioned by Raymond of Peñafort, is small compared to many other topics.
See X.5.6, cols 771–8.